how it used to be
by starry eyed dreamers
Summary: Your sentence is a lifetime, which is what you think you would've had with her, and you laugh so hard at the irony your throat feels sore. / Or, Jade's dead and everyone thinks Tori's the one who killed her.


**... I'm not sure how this happened, but I kind of like it. Enough to post it at least. I apologize if my description of an experience in a mental facility is very inaccurate, I've done very minor research but this is how Tori perceives her environment and I feel like her depression would influence her a lot where she is now. It's pretty much a prologue, and later chapters will flash back to her life with Jade, with how she is now sprinkled in.**

**Warning: Some swearing, femslash.**

They don't understand. They don't understand what it's like to feel this desolation, this devastating emptiness, so intensely you can barely move, barely register what's happening around you, barely speak because of a lump in your throat that feels too big to swallow down. They don't understand how it consumes you so fully that you don't feel a need to eat, sleep, or drink. It's just you and the world, and even as you lift your hand to scrawl these thoughts down (you follow orders well, they tell you, and the most cliche one about keeping a journal with your feelings has been the only one you don't really mind) it feels heavy, and you feel unbearably exhausted. Sometimes you wonder if it's this, this mind numbing earth breaking feeling that made you do it. You don't think you'll ever know, so you push it to the back of your mind and your eyes (one of many unreliable parts of you, you've discovered) flit to the orderlies approaching you (they always come in little packs, as if they're scared you'll kill them too), and you clear your mind, putting down your pencil and closing the book gently (not quickly, never quickly, because it's a mark of anger and then their eyes flicker and their smile falters, and it's almost amusing at how much they can judge your emotional state based on how you close a damn book).

They smile now, congratulating you on imagined (perceived) progress. You smile a big, sweet smile (all that acting practice paid off) and their smiles become a little more sincere. They don't notice that it's wrong (all wrong, everything's wrong) because they don't know you.

You also know that they don't want to know you. Your nuances, the things that make you perk up (the thought of her) and the thoughts that make you want to slit your wrists (also her). You don't ever try though, slitting your wrists, because it's grotesque and ugly and not the beautifully tragic thing some people think it is and even though they say you're a suicide risk (among a hundred other things that are wrong with you) you don't want to hurt yourself, not really.

What they do know are statistics. Your food intake, your weight, how many pills you take, and how many group sessions you attend (all of them, of course, didn't you know? You're their favorite puppet). You think of yourself, and how you must look right now, listless, your skin a sickly pallor, eyes dead as night. It's not hard to see why they would think that you're mentally unstable. Maybe it's even easier to see why they think you killed your (ex, now, you suppose) girlfriend Jade West.

But you didn't. At least, you don't think you did, the details of that afternoon are hazy but they constantly flutter around the edges of your mind, never fully disappearing, even after you down your pills and (try to) sleep. You think you like the look of the bags underneath your eyes. It adds a kind of character you don't think was there before, because you've always been a tad unremarkable, no matter what anyone says. Your therapist walks into your room, a woman, who is short and frail and looks almost as tired as you are. That's the only reason you agreed to her, because of the little similarities you see between the both of you. One of a breed of people who don't take risks or break rules, but are slowly breaking themselves. The only time you have defied the rules in here was when they brought in a tall woman to speak with you, one with black hair and faded grey eyes, and if you saw her out of the corner of your eye, it could almost be _her,_ and you screamed and cried and huddled up in the corner of the room facing the wall and it took her a few whispers of 'jade' but she finally got the hint and leave the room. You're not sure if the glass you threw at her some time in between (you're memories are getting less and less reliable) helped or harmed you, but it got her out so you aren't even sad when you discover that they've given you an aluminum cup of water the next morning.

You're almost certain she (Mrs. Morgan, she tells you her name is) likes you better as a ghost. Quieter, calmer, sweeter than all of the other patients she has to try to talk to. You think you do too, so you take the medicine and do what you're told and Jade would tell you that you were being an idiot (she was always brutally honest) and to go out with a bang but you've already whimpered and it's too late to go back now. You tell yourself you're doing this because you want to get out one day, away from all of the _whitewhitewhite_ and _desolation_ but you don't, not really, because here, you're just one of the many insane people who populate the large hospital. Outside, you know they'll judge you, stare at you accusingly and cross the street when they see you and never trust you, because the trial was splattered over the news, and even in a big city in california, murder (teenage lesbian murder, no less) is kind of a big deal.

Besides, your sentence is a lifetime, which is, ironically, what you think you would've had with her, which makes you laugh so hard at the idiocy of it all your throat feels sore. Mrs. Morgan raises her eyebrows from the book she's reading (it's a new one this time, one of those sweet romance novels that always end in the guy getting the girl and a sweet happily ever after.) and you stop abruptly. You know it will warrant a note in the notes about you, but right now you can't bring yourself to care. This is your small act of defiance, and it is what brings you closer to her, even if just by a little bit.

Some might say that's sad. You'd say that's all your life is now.

And, for the first time in a long while, you let yourself think back to before.

**Review?**


End file.
